The software you can download
here makes it possible to use the free MPEG2Enc utility to re-encode the
cut points in Cuttermaran. Cuttermaran itself is freeware but for re-encoding on
a B-Frame cut it will use TMPGEnc
which is a commercial application. Since starting with version 1.58 Cuttermaran will
allow to use other encoders as well I
wrote a connector to MPEG2Enc.

You can use CuttyEnc for free but on your own risk. The source code can
be found here.
The official documentation is on the HighPaq.Net. Since you are using Cuttermaran I would suggest
to take a look at the great DVD Guide on this site.

If Cuttermaran 1.63 is up and running the following additional installations have
to be done to get the connector running:

There should be some directory with version 0.6.9 of the DVD Author binaries which include the command line tool MPEG2Enc and
additional DLLs which are used by CuttyEnc

The same tool version is included (or recommended, depending on the download) with
the DVD Author GUI 0.75 -
these are the files I use

Copy the files from the download above into the Provider/encode directory
of Cuttermaran

The next time Cuttermaran is started the new encoder can be selected using the Actions/Settings...
dialog.

After the encoder has been selected it must be configured once before it can
be used by pressing the Configure... button (the dialog might
be in german depending on the language selected in Cuttermaran).

The directory path to the MPEG2Enc und DLLs is selected by double clicking the text
field. The additional option should be left in the original state.

If the directory path is not set MPEG2Enc must either be in the
encode directory itself or in a directory External Tools below
the Cuttermaran main directory or CuttyEnc will fail. The error message generated
will not be very helpful if you're not a .NET developer - sorry for that.

Changes in Version 1.2.0.1 (2005/11/29)

Since the special HDTV version of MPEG2Enc.exe does not work well with SDTV (standard)
MPEG-2 matrial the code has been changed so that both variants can be installed
together. CuttyEnc will then only use the patched version when MPEG-2 HDTV input
is detected. It's strongly recommended to check if you use the patched version and
replace it with the standard one if not excusivly cutting HDTV. To do so create
a sub folder HDTV in the folder where the patched MPEG2Enc.exe is located and
copy the patched MPEG2Enc.exe and CygWin1.dll into it. Then replace the MPEG2Enc.exe
in the original place with the unpatched version.

Changes in Version 1.2.0.0 (2005/3/15)

Experimental fixes to support cutting HDTV material as described in the
Cuttermaran forum. The changes should not harm normal operations because
the additional code activates only at 720 (or more) vertical lines per frame.

The HDTV modus will only work without error message if you use the patched MPEG2Enc.exe
version as explained in the Cuttermaran forum - please refer to the discussion thread
for more details.

Changes in Version 1.1.0.0 (2004/11/12)

The first version of CuttyEnc used the free JPEG2YUV tool included with the DVDAuthor
and the GUI for DVDAuthor. The version included has a bug which leads to a change
in the colors. In fact there is a newer version of the tool which (with a new command
line option -R) corrects this behaviour. This version is not available as a windows
binary download yet and most important: after taking a deeper look in
the problem I found that JPEG2YUV is not really needed!

Cuttermaran offers the movie sequence to re-encode as an AVI file to the encoding
provider. The codec used is YV12. The originial CuttyEnc took this, decoded it to
BMP (RGB), packed it to JPEG and let JPEG2YUV generate a so called YUV4MPEG2 stream
which is the only input format accepted by MPEG2Enc. Not only the colors are changed
but there is quite a bit of quality loss due to the conversions and packings
involved.

Starting with 1.1.0.0 CuttyEnc no longer needes JPEG2YUV. In fact the expected YUV4MPEG2
stream uses a IYUV codec with only some additional string headers in between. IYUV
is semantically identically to YV12 with only the color planes physically swapped.
So CuttyEnc takes the YV12 input, swapps the color plans, adds the headers and sends
the result to MPEG2Enc. MPEG2Enc will get the exact output from Cuttermaran with
no color modifications and full quality. No processing time gets lost due to conversions
and no temporary file space is needed in addition to the AVI file from Cuttermaran
itself.

The result is now nearly the same as for TMPGEnc. In very large magnifications some
tiny artefacts on color borders are visible which TMPGEnc will not produce. Personally
I don't think that this is worth the difference in price. In addition the 'DVD compliant
stream' option in Cuttermarn now generates a smooth result and even in an animation
scene I could see no difference from the original movie - using 8000kbps encoding
and no magnifier.